Scrivener is great for novels and other long-form writing. But I use it as an organizing tool for all of my writing, which is mainly short form. I have one Scrivener file I named Substack which contains all of the stories I have published over the past three years on Substack. I have folders for Story Ideas, In Progress stories, and Ready To Publish stories. All of the published stories are organized into folders also, such as One Minute Wit, Microfiction, Humor, Fiction, Poetry, etc. It makes finding stories a breeze.
I use separate Scrivener files for my novels because they contain lots of research and notes. And I like having it all in one file. The Novel template does most of the setup work for you. And the ability to easily move chapter around at will is awesome.
Scrivener is very adaptable to what you want it to be. And perfect for an organizing geek like me. And a bargain!
I also have a 'Substack' Scrivener project containing an archive of my work. ;)
And yes, it really is very adaptable. It's script features are fairly decent these days, too, for comics or screen/stage writing.
That ability to step back and see an overview of a large project is the key thing for me, I think. While writing Triverse, which is a big and sprawling thing, I can still easily assess the overall shape. That's critical for pacing, and for making sure I don't trip over my own continuity.
Yes! I like how I can see an overview of the whole project by looking at the chapters. It is sort of a pre-outline for me. I can plot out the chapter names (and scenes) and then move them around to get a feel for the flow of the novel. It is especially helpful when you have two storylines going. I also use custom icons for chapters so I can quickly see who the chapter is about.
Because my current serial is episodic and somewhat like an anthology of stories within the main story, I've got a folder of 'episode ideas' that I can pull from at any time. Those individual ideas can be slotted in anywhere along the main storyline, so for the last two years I've literally been checking the ideas folder and dragging ideas into the manuscript to be turned into chapters.
That ability to zoom in and out of the project is so useful.
I love using Scrivener. I bought it a long time ago and upgraded it when dark mode came out. It works in the same style as my ADHD brain works. I can throw everything in there but keep things organized in folders. I keep different workbooks for different projects. I bought it discounted for Nanowrimo, then I ended up purchasing a set of tutorials from Joseph Michael. https://www.learnscrivenerfast.com/
I am a notebook writer but the latest project is proving to be anything other than straight forward. Is it easy to move scenes around / change the timeline?
It really is. It depends how you decide to structure the project within Scrivener, but the default is to have scenes within chapters be distinct documents within the project. That way you can see them all at a glance and shuffle them about as needed.
Cool, thanks for insights, lessons and inspiration shared. Like the small "beginning" portion of tutorial you cover in your Scrivener series. Plain and simple to follow. Great work Simon.
I suspect I'll in a close future take a leap from Evernote to Scrivener as Evernote, the platform I use, feels nothing close to Scrivener in terms of organizing and structuring ideas and such alike, and not to mention other issues I got related to syncing between devices on Evernote.
Have to ask, do you have any experience co-writing on Scrivener and in that case, what is your experience in regards to functionality?
I haven't tried that, and I don't think it has any kind of built-in functionality.
If I was doing an intensive co-writing project I think I'd probably opt for something like Google Docs. It's much more basic than Scrivener generally, but it's collaborative features are amazing. You could always then bring the finished chapters into Scrivener for subsequent editing work, perhaps.
You could IN THEORY have a shared Scrivener project that you sync using Dropbox or Google Drive with each other, but I'd be too worried about versioning problems and having the files open at the same time etc and getting into a mess.
Google docs is probably more functional than Evernote in regard to co-writing then. Additionally, my patience is not gonna help me with potential version hassle 😊. Silly, how I never even thought of Google docs as an option, when it's basically (literally one click away) just right in front of me. Cheers!
Scrivener files can be stored in Dropbox, and syncs satisfactorily through this. I use it on a desktop, a laptop and an iPad with no problems in syncing. I've not co-written using Scrivener but as long as the co-authors are not working at the same time (this really screws it up) it should be possible.
I could see this being useful in my day job for certain (long-form legal writer). But for substack short nonfiction essays, I think maybe I could get some use out of it as well. I’ll noodle on it, but I do tend to cite original research, articles, and books in my work here. I can see maybe creating a binder for each essay and collating all the source materials. I’m assuming you can import pdf documents. Thanks for this intro—I’m intrigued! I’m going to pop over to their site and look around.
You can import files, yes. PDFs, images, even offline copies of web pages. For both legal and nonfiction/academic work I can see it being useful for keeping track of all those sources. There are all sorts of handy ways to tag and label document, too, which would help with quickly finding specific things.
Fantastic. Well, I am very much looking forward to your upcoming videos in this series. Thank you for doing this. I just downloaded the trial version last night, and I am going to try importing several pdfs and photos for a science-y piece I’m about to start on, and give it a shot! I’m excited. Until now, I’ve been writing in the substack dashboard, with folders and files and tabs open in their multitudes. The amount of time I’ve wasted dragging windows around my desktop!! Thanks again.
Thanks Simon, I‘m a beginner, with a stack of short stories, a newsletter, and I‘m working on a longer project. I‘ll keep watching, hoping to convince myself that I need a tool like that for the big project.
Great video and I think you capture what Scrivener is all about. I love having my world-building and character notes readily accessible in one file (although sometimes I make random notes in draft emails when I'm AFK that I need to port over to the project file). Looking forward to the next installment!
The one feature I wish they would add would be sharing parts of a project across multiple projects. This would be useful for books in a series. I'm up to book 3 in my series, and I have to move over all the character/location/world-building notes to the newest book each time. It would be great to have one corpus of notes for a particular series. (Also I'm writing two things in the same series at the same time, so things are currently messy).
I've thought about using Notion as a substitute for this, but haven't gotten around to seeing if that would work well.
Thanks, Jon! I suppose you could theoretically have all the books in the series in the single Scrivener project, though that's maybe putting too many eggs into one basket. Might also take a while to open the project. :)
I did think of that, after watching the video. But I do like keeping things separate and definitely don't want to create some mega file that crashes the program ;)
One benefit (that I've never had to use) is that I believe Scrivener project files are a collection of rich text files within a folder. So even if something catastrophic happened that prevented the project from opening, you should still be able to access the individual documents externally.
I currently use Scrivener for my serial and for my 100 Word Stories. I also have a Story Bible for any universe I create that holds all the character/location sheets as well as master outlines for everything I'm writing or intend to write in the future. Scrivener is great for creating Story Bibles (as I like to call them).
When it comes to my 100 Word Stories with each month being a "theme" and the fact that I need to not only track each story but collect them into groups of 100 for each book I will begin to release this year, having Scrivener to do that is helpful.
I don't currently use it for anything else. Meaning, that I likely won't ever use the Compile feature until I prepare to take Sleight of Hand (my 2024 serial) from it's serial form to novel form and even then, it will just be to get it from a .scriv file to a .docx to then import it to .indd as that's what I always use to format my work prior to uploading it to whatever program I'm using for print publishing.
I realize I went too deep down the rabbit hole on this already! lol Excellent tutorial. I am sure many will get a handle on it surely. Though, you might want to mention cost. I was surprised you didn't mention that first. I always will say "it costs X amount BUT if you participate in Nano then you can get it 25% off for participating and 50% off for finishing Nano with 50k words." Helps so people don't get put off by the $50 price tag. At least, I think it's still $50? I'm not sure. I purchased Scrivener over a decade ago...
Ha, yes, not mentioning the price was definitely an oversight. As with you, it's partly because I bought it SO long ago, and it's given me so much value, that it doesn't quite register. Also, because it is ridiculously cheap for a professional tool.
Love all your different examples of how it's been useful!
Scrivener was a life saver for me: For every project I start there’s always pages and pages of notes/ideas. Scrivener helped me to distribute the notes in a way that I could make sense of it all. I really couldn’t do without it.
Same here. I also generate a huge amount of notes while writing. I wouldn't be able to write and publish in the way I do without something like Scrivener. It really streamlines the process for me.
I've attempted and abandoned it multiple times. My latest project however may benefit for all the reasons you describe. Importing all the notes, research, latest draft into Scrivener from my current docs and apps? Well, that maybe be yet another challenge. But I will take a fresh look. So, thanks Simon. I think...
How to transfer an existing project into Scrivener is something I hope to cover in a future video.
Part of the challenge with Scrivener is that unless you're working on a major project, it's not always apparent how useful it can be. But paradoxically, you don't really want to commit to using a new, untested tool when you're embarking on a new major project. So it's a bit catch-22 in that regard.
As per your article's intent. I've got an 85k word project with notes and versions scattered everywhere. Keeping my head clear has been a problem. I'll continue to look forward to your insights. Your stack, btw has been instrumental in my decision to expose my work here. Thank you for that... Keep up all the great work & insights!
I’m in the same boat! Multiple versions and stuff I’d forgotten I’d written every damn where. I wish I knew if transferring it all to Scrivener- if that’s what it would be called - would be helpful. Next book, definitely will use it!
I wish Scrivener would have a Publish to Substack, WordPress, Medium, etc feature so it would be more useful as a central database for all writing. But I use it to organize all my essays I publish on multiple platforms.
Scrivener is great for novels and other long-form writing. But I use it as an organizing tool for all of my writing, which is mainly short form. I have one Scrivener file I named Substack which contains all of the stories I have published over the past three years on Substack. I have folders for Story Ideas, In Progress stories, and Ready To Publish stories. All of the published stories are organized into folders also, such as One Minute Wit, Microfiction, Humor, Fiction, Poetry, etc. It makes finding stories a breeze.
I use separate Scrivener files for my novels because they contain lots of research and notes. And I like having it all in one file. The Novel template does most of the setup work for you. And the ability to easily move chapter around at will is awesome.
Scrivener is very adaptable to what you want it to be. And perfect for an organizing geek like me. And a bargain!
I also have a 'Substack' Scrivener project containing an archive of my work. ;)
And yes, it really is very adaptable. It's script features are fairly decent these days, too, for comics or screen/stage writing.
That ability to step back and see an overview of a large project is the key thing for me, I think. While writing Triverse, which is a big and sprawling thing, I can still easily assess the overall shape. That's critical for pacing, and for making sure I don't trip over my own continuity.
Yes! I like how I can see an overview of the whole project by looking at the chapters. It is sort of a pre-outline for me. I can plot out the chapter names (and scenes) and then move them around to get a feel for the flow of the novel. It is especially helpful when you have two storylines going. I also use custom icons for chapters so I can quickly see who the chapter is about.
Because my current serial is episodic and somewhat like an anthology of stories within the main story, I've got a folder of 'episode ideas' that I can pull from at any time. Those individual ideas can be slotted in anywhere along the main storyline, so for the last two years I've literally been checking the ideas folder and dragging ideas into the manuscript to be turned into chapters.
That ability to zoom in and out of the project is so useful.
Yes! I refuse to draft or make developmental edits in anything but Scrivener. It's such a fabulous writing tool!
It's also pleasantly affordable for a professional tool. And, so far, hasn't switched to a restrictive subscription model, either.
I love using Scrivener. I bought it a long time ago and upgraded it when dark mode came out. It works in the same style as my ADHD brain works. I can throw everything in there but keep things organized in folders. I keep different workbooks for different projects. I bought it discounted for Nanowrimo, then I ended up purchasing a set of tutorials from Joseph Michael. https://www.learnscrivenerfast.com/
Nice! It’s best feature is the way it can adapt to each user’s brain and preferences. It’s whatever we each need it to be.
I am a notebook writer but the latest project is proving to be anything other than straight forward. Is it easy to move scenes around / change the timeline?
It really is. It depends how you decide to structure the project within Scrivener, but the default is to have scenes within chapters be distinct documents within the project. That way you can see them all at a glance and shuffle them about as needed.
Cool, thanks for insights, lessons and inspiration shared. Like the small "beginning" portion of tutorial you cover in your Scrivener series. Plain and simple to follow. Great work Simon.
I suspect I'll in a close future take a leap from Evernote to Scrivener as Evernote, the platform I use, feels nothing close to Scrivener in terms of organizing and structuring ideas and such alike, and not to mention other issues I got related to syncing between devices on Evernote.
Have to ask, do you have any experience co-writing on Scrivener and in that case, what is your experience in regards to functionality?
I haven't tried that, and I don't think it has any kind of built-in functionality.
If I was doing an intensive co-writing project I think I'd probably opt for something like Google Docs. It's much more basic than Scrivener generally, but it's collaborative features are amazing. You could always then bring the finished chapters into Scrivener for subsequent editing work, perhaps.
You could IN THEORY have a shared Scrivener project that you sync using Dropbox or Google Drive with each other, but I'd be too worried about versioning problems and having the files open at the same time etc and getting into a mess.
Thanks for your advice and response.
Google docs is probably more functional than Evernote in regard to co-writing then. Additionally, my patience is not gonna help me with potential version hassle 😊. Silly, how I never even thought of Google docs as an option, when it's basically (literally one click away) just right in front of me. Cheers!
Scrivener files can be stored in Dropbox, and syncs satisfactorily through this. I use it on a desktop, a laptop and an iPad with no problems in syncing. I've not co-written using Scrivener but as long as the co-authors are not working at the same time (this really screws it up) it should be possible.
Update: plays fine in a mobile browser. It's just yet another bug in the mobile app, which I really should delete, because the app is utterly broken.
I could see this being useful in my day job for certain (long-form legal writer). But for substack short nonfiction essays, I think maybe I could get some use out of it as well. I’ll noodle on it, but I do tend to cite original research, articles, and books in my work here. I can see maybe creating a binder for each essay and collating all the source materials. I’m assuming you can import pdf documents. Thanks for this intro—I’m intrigued! I’m going to pop over to their site and look around.
You can import files, yes. PDFs, images, even offline copies of web pages. For both legal and nonfiction/academic work I can see it being useful for keeping track of all those sources. There are all sorts of handy ways to tag and label document, too, which would help with quickly finding specific things.
Fantastic. Well, I am very much looking forward to your upcoming videos in this series. Thank you for doing this. I just downloaded the trial version last night, and I am going to try importing several pdfs and photos for a science-y piece I’m about to start on, and give it a shot! I’m excited. Until now, I’ve been writing in the substack dashboard, with folders and files and tabs open in their multitudes. The amount of time I’ve wasted dragging windows around my desktop!! Thanks again.
Have fun! It's a VERY generous demo, as I recall - it lasts 30 days of actual use, not 30 days of passing time.
Thanks Simon, I‘m a beginner, with a stack of short stories, a newsletter, and I‘m working on a longer project. I‘ll keep watching, hoping to convince myself that I need a tool like that for the big project.
Hope I can help! I need to make the videos more quickly....
Great video and I think you capture what Scrivener is all about. I love having my world-building and character notes readily accessible in one file (although sometimes I make random notes in draft emails when I'm AFK that I need to port over to the project file). Looking forward to the next installment!
The one feature I wish they would add would be sharing parts of a project across multiple projects. This would be useful for books in a series. I'm up to book 3 in my series, and I have to move over all the character/location/world-building notes to the newest book each time. It would be great to have one corpus of notes for a particular series. (Also I'm writing two things in the same series at the same time, so things are currently messy).
I've thought about using Notion as a substitute for this, but haven't gotten around to seeing if that would work well.
Thanks, Jon! I suppose you could theoretically have all the books in the series in the single Scrivener project, though that's maybe putting too many eggs into one basket. Might also take a while to open the project. :)
I did think of that, after watching the video. But I do like keeping things separate and definitely don't want to create some mega file that crashes the program ;)
One benefit (that I've never had to use) is that I believe Scrivener project files are a collection of rich text files within a folder. So even if something catastrophic happened that prevented the project from opening, you should still be able to access the individual documents externally.
I'd rather not have to test that, though. :D
I currently use Scrivener for my serial and for my 100 Word Stories. I also have a Story Bible for any universe I create that holds all the character/location sheets as well as master outlines for everything I'm writing or intend to write in the future. Scrivener is great for creating Story Bibles (as I like to call them).
When it comes to my 100 Word Stories with each month being a "theme" and the fact that I need to not only track each story but collect them into groups of 100 for each book I will begin to release this year, having Scrivener to do that is helpful.
I don't currently use it for anything else. Meaning, that I likely won't ever use the Compile feature until I prepare to take Sleight of Hand (my 2024 serial) from it's serial form to novel form and even then, it will just be to get it from a .scriv file to a .docx to then import it to .indd as that's what I always use to format my work prior to uploading it to whatever program I'm using for print publishing.
I realize I went too deep down the rabbit hole on this already! lol Excellent tutorial. I am sure many will get a handle on it surely. Though, you might want to mention cost. I was surprised you didn't mention that first. I always will say "it costs X amount BUT if you participate in Nano then you can get it 25% off for participating and 50% off for finishing Nano with 50k words." Helps so people don't get put off by the $50 price tag. At least, I think it's still $50? I'm not sure. I purchased Scrivener over a decade ago...
Ha, yes, not mentioning the price was definitely an oversight. As with you, it's partly because I bought it SO long ago, and it's given me so much value, that it doesn't quite register. Also, because it is ridiculously cheap for a professional tool.
Love all your different examples of how it's been useful!
Scrivener was a life saver for me: For every project I start there’s always pages and pages of notes/ideas. Scrivener helped me to distribute the notes in a way that I could make sense of it all. I really couldn’t do without it.
Same here. I also generate a huge amount of notes while writing. I wouldn't be able to write and publish in the way I do without something like Scrivener. It really streamlines the process for me.
I've attempted and abandoned it multiple times. My latest project however may benefit for all the reasons you describe. Importing all the notes, research, latest draft into Scrivener from my current docs and apps? Well, that maybe be yet another challenge. But I will take a fresh look. So, thanks Simon. I think...
How to transfer an existing project into Scrivener is something I hope to cover in a future video.
Part of the challenge with Scrivener is that unless you're working on a major project, it's not always apparent how useful it can be. But paradoxically, you don't really want to commit to using a new, untested tool when you're embarking on a new major project. So it's a bit catch-22 in that regard.
As per your article's intent. I've got an 85k word project with notes and versions scattered everywhere. Keeping my head clear has been a problem. I'll continue to look forward to your insights. Your stack, btw has been instrumental in my decision to expose my work here. Thank you for that... Keep up all the great work & insights!
Ah, thanks, William! Glad to have been useful. I've had a lot of fun writing and publishing here, so I hope you do as well.
I’m in the same boat! Multiple versions and stuff I’d forgotten I’d written every damn where. I wish I knew if transferring it all to Scrivener- if that’s what it would be called - would be helpful. Next book, definitely will use it!
Simon, did you get my email about Scrivener? I haven't heard from you about it and just wanted to check.
I did! Apologies for not responding yet. It's been a busy couple of weeks! It's on the list, though, I promise.
I wish Scrivener would have a Publish to Substack, WordPress, Medium, etc feature so it would be more useful as a central database for all writing. But I use it to organize all my essays I publish on multiple platforms.
Been using Scrivener since 2015. I know I don’t use half of its potencial.
It’s always fun to hear about how people are using Scrivener. Coincidentally, I published a post about Scrivener (and other writing tools) just yesterday: I call it one of my “Containers for Chaos”! https://open.substack.com/pub/helensword/p/how-i-wrote-writing-with-pleasure